PEOPLE IN INDONESIA: UNITY, DIVERSITY, CHARACTERISTICS, ADAT

PEOPLE IN INDONESIA

20120513-two_women_winnowing_rice Lombok.JPG
Women winnowing rice in Lombok, Indonesia People in Indonesia are called Indonesians. People of Malay descent make up a large portion of the populations in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The adjective Indonesian refers to the people of Indonesia, which is a relatively recent construct. Many people in Indonesia go by the island of their origin— Javanese, Balinese, Sumatran, Moluccan—or their ethnic group—Batak, Toraja or Sundanese. Some names like Madurese or even Javanese, refer to both an ethnic group and a people from an island.

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous nation after China, India and the United States. There are 283,587,097 (2025 estimate) people in Indonesia, about half of which live in urban areas. Two thirds of Indonesia's people live on Java, Madura and Bali which together occupy only eight percent of the land area of Indonesia. Indonesia is also the most populous Muslim nation. Only Pakistan and India approach it in terms of total number of Muslims.

Indonesia is a culturally very diverse nation. Ethnic identities are not always clear, stable (even for individuals), or agreed upon; ethnic groups may appear or profess to be more distinct socially or culturally than they actually are. But there are about 350 recognized ethnolinguistic groups in Indonesia, 180 of them located in Papua; 13 languages have more than 1 million speakers (see below). Javanese make up 45 percent of the population, Sundanese 14 percent, Madurese 7.5 percent, coastal Malays 7.5 percent, and others 26 percent. [Source: Library of Congress]

Indonesians over the years have been called “Indonesians,” Malay Islanders,” and East Indians.” The term "Indonesian" was invented by James Richardson Logan in his study The Languages and Ethnology of the Indian Archipelago (1857). Although there is great variety of ethnic groups in Indonesia today, the people of Indonesia are unified by national language, economy and religion. Some anthropologist distinguish three loosely-defined Indonesian cultures: 1) Hinduized societies that practice rice culture; 2) Islamized coastal cultures; and 3) remote tribal groups.

Indonesian Physical Characteristics

Indonesians are typically short (males average 1.5 to 1.6 meters in height) and have black hair and a medium brown complexion. People living in the western region of Indonesia—including Sumatra, Java, and Bali—generally resembled populations of the Malay Peninsula (now part of Malaysia), with straight black hair, round eyes, and darker complexions. [Source: “Culture and Customs of Indonesia” by Jill Forshee, Greenwood Press, 2006]

In contrast, in the eastern parts of the archipelago, particularly the Lesser Sunda Islands (Nusa Tenggara Timur) and the Maluku Islands, Papuan or Melanesian physical features were more common. Tightly curled hair and darker skin tones characterized people from islands such as Flores, Timor, Ambon, and Papua. Before the last Ice Age, the island now divided politically into Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya (West Papua) had been connected by land to Australia. As a result, the indigenous populations of this region bore strong physical similarities to Aboriginal Australians.

Across the Indonesian archipelago, however, populations had intermixed over many centuries. On most sizeable islands, people could trace their ancestry to a wide range of groups, including Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Persians, Europeans, Africans, and other Southeast Asians. Portuguese colonizers introduced Africans into areas such as Flores and East Timor, and in present-day East Timor some individuals claimed descent from Mozambique and Angola. This long history of migration and intermarriage meant that there was no single, uniform Indonesian physical “type,” and it is unlikely that such a type ever existed.

Origin and Composition of Indonesians

Indonesians have traditionally been categorized as people of Malay stock but are also regarded as mix of southern Mongols, Proto-Malays, Polynesians, and in some areas, Arab, Indian or Chinese. The main non-Malay people are ethnic groups who live in West Papua (Irian Jaya, on New Guinea) and nearby islands. They are Melansian and related to people in Papua New Guinea and islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean. Some places such as Timor are regarded as Malay, Melanesian mix.

Malays evolved from the migration of people southward from present-day Yunnan in China and eastward from the peninsula to the Pacific islands, where Malyo-Polynesian languages still predominate. The Malays arrived in several, continuous waves and displaced the Orang Asli (aboriginals) and pre-Islamic or proto Malay. Early Chinese and Indian travelers that visited Malaysia reported village farming metal-using settlements.

Combination of the colonial Kambujas of Hindu-Buddhism faith, the Indo-Persian royalties and traders as well as traders from southern China and elsewhere along the ancient trade routes, these peoples together with the aborigine Negrito Orang Asli and native seafarers and Proto Malays intermarried each other's and thus a new group of peoples was formed and became to be known as the Deutero Malays, today they are commonly known as the Malays.

Indonesia has a long history of colonial contact. Following initial contact with the Portuguese, Spanish and English, the entire Indonesian archipelago came under Dutch colonial rule from 1627 to 1942. Throughout this period, the Dutch focused primarily on developing commerce and plantation crops and did relatively little to modernise society or spread Christianity. The Japanese invasion of 1942 ultimately led to Indonesia's independence in 1949. [Source: Paul Hockings Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Gale Group, Inc., 1996]

Early Indigenous People in Malaysia

The indigenous groups on peninsular Malaysia can be divided into three ethnicities, the Negritos, the Senois, and the proto-Malays. The first inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula were most probably Negritos. These Mesolithic hunters were probably the ancestors of the Semang, an ethnic Negrito group who have a long history in the Malay Peninsula. It is likely they have traveled to Sumatra which is not so far away across the Malacca Straits. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Proto Malays have a more diverse origin, and were settled in Malaysia by 1000BC. Although they show some connections with other inhabitants in Maritime Southeast Asia, some also have an ancestry in Indochina around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20,000 years ago. Anthropologists support the notion that the Proto-Malays originated from what is today Yunnan, China. This was followed by an early-Holocene dispersal through the Malay Peninsula into the Malay Archipelago. Around 300 BC, they were pushed inland by the Deutero-Malays, an Iron Age or Bronze Age people descended partly from the Chams of Cambodia and Vietnam. The first group in the peninsula to use metal tools, the Deutero-Malays were the direct ancestors of today's Malaysian Malays, and brought with them advanced farming techniques. The Malays remained politically fragmented throughout the Malay archipelago, although a common culture and social structure was shared.

Anthropologists traced a group of newcomers Proto Malay seafarers who migrated from Yunnan to Malaysia. Negrito and other Aborigines were forced by late comers into the hills. In this period, people learned to dress, to cook, to hunt with advanced stone weapons. Communication techniques also improved.

Diversity Among Indonesian People

Indonesia encompasses some 17,508 islands (some sources say 13,667 islands, other sources say as many as 18,000), of which about 6,000 are inhabited. Indonesia’s social and geographic environment is one of the most complex and varied in the world. By one count, at least 731 distinct languages and more than 1,100 different dialects are spoken in the archipelago. The landscape ranges from rain forests and steaming mangrove swamps to arid plains and snowcapped mountains. Major world religions—Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism—are represented, as well as many varieties of animistic practices and ancestor worship. [Library of Congress *]

1) Each province has its own language, ethnic makeup, religion and history. 2) Most people will identify with their local area before identifying as national. 3) Additionally, there are many cultural influences stemming from differences in heritage. Indonesians are a mixture of Chinese, European, Indian and Malay peoples. Although Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, it also has significant Christian, Protestant, Catholic, Hindu and Buddhist minorities. This great diversity requires a great deal of attention from the government to maintain cohesion. As a result, the national motto is "Unity in Diversity", the language has been standardized, and a national philosophy has been devised known as "Pancasila", which stresses universal justice for all Indonesians. [Source: kwintessential.co.uk]

Systems of local political authority vary from the ornate sultans’ courts of central Java to the egalitarian communities of hunter- gatherers in the jungles of Kalimantan. A variety of economic patterns also can be found within Indonesia’s borders, from rudimentary slash-and-burn agriculture to highly sophisticated computer microchip industries. Some Indonesian communities rely on traditional feasting systems and marriage exchange for economic distribution, while others act as sophisticated brokers in international trading networks operating throughout the world. Indonesians also have a variety of living arrangements. Some go home at night to extended families living in isolated bamboo longhouses; others return to hamlets of tiny houses clustered around a mosque; still others go home to nuclear families in urban high-rise apartment complexes. *

Indonesia’s variations in culture have been shaped by centuries of complex interactions with the physical environment. Although Indonesians in general are now less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature as a result of improved technology and social programs, it is still possible to discern ways in which cultural variations are linked to traditional patterns of adjustment to their physical circumstances. *

The majority of the population embraces Islam, while in Bali the Hindu religion is predominant. In areas like the Minahasa in North Sulawesi, the Toraja highlands in South Sulawesi, in the East Nusatenggara islands and in large parts of Papua, in the Batak highlands as well as on Nias island in North Sumatra, the majority are either Catholics or Protestants.[Source: Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, Republic of Indonesia]

Unity Among Indonesia’s People

There are striking similarities among the nation’s diverse groups. Besides citizenship in a common nation-state, the single most unifying cultural characteristic is a shared linguistic heritage. Almost all of the nation’s estimated 240 million people speak at least one of several Austronesian languages, which, although often not mutually intelligible, share many vocabulary items and have similar sentence patterns. Most important, an estimated 83 percent of the population can speak Bahasa Indonesia, the official national language. Used in government, schools, print and electronic media, and multiethnic cities, this Malay-derived language is both an important unifying symbol and a vehicle of national integration. *

True to the Pancasila, the five principles of nationhood — namely Belief in the One and Only God, a Just and Civilized Humanity, the Unity of Indonesia, Democracy through unanimous deliberations, and Social Justice for all — Indonesian societies are open and remain tolerant towards one another’s religion, customs and traditions, all the while faithfully adhering to their own. The Indonesian coat of arms moreover bears the motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika – Unity in Diversity. [Source: Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, Republic of Indonesia ^^^]

The society of many groups have traditionally been divided into three groups: nobles, commoners and slaves. Although slavery has formally been abolished it continues to exits as a social rank. To have a slave as an ancestor equates to low status. Adat (local customary practices) is supervised and administered by a headmen and elders. Sometimes it is codified like modern laws. But often each village has their own adat. Some Muslim groups practice female circumcision. Headhunting was practiced by many groups, particularly those on Borneo and West Papua.

After Independence in 1945 inter-marriages among people of different ethnic groups became more common and this development has helped weld the population into a more cohesive Indonesian nation. Although today’s youth especially in the large cities is modern and follow international trends, yet when it comes to weddings, couples still adhere to traditions on the side of both the bride’s and bridegroom’s parents. So in a mixed ethnic wedding, the vows and wedding traditions may follow the bride’s family’s, while during the reception elaborate decorations and costumes follow the groom’s ethnic traditions, or vice versa. Weddings and wedding receptions in Indonesia are a great introduction to Indonesia’s many and diverse customs and traditions. Weddings are often also occasions to display one’s social status, wealth and fashion sense. Even in villages, hundreds or even thousands of wedding invitees line up to congratulate the couple and their parents who are seated on stage, and then enjoy the wedding feast and entertainment. ^^^

Modernization of Indonesia’s People

In 2007 some 50 percent of Indonesians lived in cities, defined by the government’s Central Statistical Office as areas with population densities greater than 5,000 persons per square kilometer or where fewer than 25 percent of households are employed in the agricultural sector. The percentage of Indonesians who live in rural areas, and who are closely associated with agriculture, stockbreeding, forestry, or fishing, has been declining steadily. For example, about 53 percent of the workforce was employed in agriculture, hunting, forestry, and fishing as recently as the mid- 1980s; by 2005 that figure had decreased to 44 percent. [Source: Library of Congress *]

As the Indonesian population has grown, become more educated, and moved increasingly toward urban centers, small-scale agriculture and trading have played decreasing roles in defining people’s lifestyles. The rapid expansion of the manufacturing, retail, and service industries has led to ways of living defined more by social, cultural, and economic interests than by geographic and environmental forces.*

The mobility, educational achievement, and urbanization of the Indonesian population have increased overall since the mid-1990s. Indonesians have become increasingly exposed to the variety of their nation’s cultures through television, the Internet, newspapers, schools, and cultural activities. Links to indigenous geographic regions and sociocultural heritage have weakened, and the contexts for the expression of those links have narrowed. Ethnicity is a means of identification in certain situations but not in others. For example, during Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, peasants from Java might emphasize their Islamic faith and affiliation, whereas in other settings they emphasize their membership in the national state by attending school, participating in family-planning programs, and belonging to village cooperatives, and by invoking the Pancasila, the state ideology, as a moral justification for personal and family choices. In a similar way, isolated hill tribes living in the interior of islands such as Sulawesi, Seram, or Timor might express devotion to ancestral spirits through animal sacrifice at home but swear loyalty to the Indonesian state in school or at the polls. A person’s identity as an Indonesian is richly interwoven with familial, regional, and ethnic heritage. *

Indonesian Identity

Indonesia’s size and ethnic diversity made the development of a unified national identity both complex and subject to debate. Identity was defined at several levels: through citizenship; recognition of national symbols such as the flag, national anthem, and other patriotic songs; observance of national holidays; and education about the country’s history and the Five Principles (Pancasila) on which the state was founded. [Source: Clark E. Cunningham, Countries and Their Cultures, Gale Group Inc., 2001; Governments of the World: A Global Guide to Citizens' Rights and Responsibilities, Thomson Gale, 2006]

The main factor linking Indonesia’s highly diverse regions was their shared experience as part of the Dutch East Indies. Nationalism began to emerge across the archipelago in the early twentieth century, gradually uniting regions divided by religion, ethnicity, and language into a single political movement. Independence was proclaimed at the end of World War II on August 17, 1945.

Much of this identity formation was shaped through schools and the media, both of which were closely regulated by the government during much of the post-independence period. National history emphasized resistance to colonialism and communism, highlighting heroes and leaders whose names were commemorated in streets and public spaces. While the achievements of earlier civilizations were acknowledged, most surviving archaeological remains were associated with Javanese kingdoms.

Ethnic Groups in Indonesia

Indonesia is a culturally very diverse nation. There are thousands of ethnic identities in Indonesia and people identify quite strongly with their roots. In some areas of the country the conflicts between ethnic groups are more pronounced and, as we have seen in the news of recent years, quite brutal and violent. In Bali, the Balinese identify with their Balinese heritage above being Indonesian, as do the Javanese, the Sudanese, etc. I think this is the norm for most groups regardless of the region or province of origin.

Ethnic identities are not always clear, stable (even for individuals), or agreed upon; ethnic groups may appear or profess to be more distinct socially or culturally than they actually are. But there are about 350 recognized ethnolinguistic groups in Indonesia, 180 of them located in Papua; 13 languages have more than 1 million speakers.

The Indonesian population is made up of 100 to 300 ethnic groups (depending on how they are counted) who speak around 300 different regional languages. Most of the people are of Malay descent. The Javanese are the largest ethnic group. Living primarily in the eastern and central part of Java, they make up of 40 to 45 percent of the population (depending on the source and how they are defined) and dominate the country's politics. The Sudanese, who also live on Java, are the second largest group (15.5 percent). The other large ethnic groups are Malays (3.7 percent) and Batak (3.6 percent), who live primarily on Sumatra; the Madurese (3 percent), who are the island of Madura and Java; Betawi (2.9 percent); Minangkabau (2.7 percent); Buginese (2.7 percent) on Sulawesi; Bantenese (2 percent); Banjarese (1.7 percent); Chinese (1.2 percent); Balinese (1.7 percent) on Bali; the Acehnese (1.4 percent) in northern Sumatra; Dayak (1.4 percent) in Kalimantan; Sasak (1.3 percent); Chinese (1.2 percent); Other 15 percent. (2010 est., CIA World Factbook]

Adat and Traditions in Multi-Ethnic Indonesia

Traditionally farmers and fishermen, they have made great advances in the last 30 years. As this increasingly mobile, multiethnic nation moves into its seventh decade of independence, Indonesians are becoming aware— through education, television, cinema, print media, and national parks—of the diversity of their own society. When Indonesians talk about their cultural differences with one another, one of the key words they use is adat. The term is roughly translated as “custom” or “tradition,” but its meaning has undergone a number of transformations in Indonesia. In some circumstances, for instance, adat has a kind of legal status—certain adat laws (hukum adat) are recognized by the government as legitimate. These ancestral guidelines may pertain to a wide range of activities: agricultural production, religious practices, marriage arrangements, legal practices, political succession, or artistic expression. [Library of Congress *]

Even though the vast majority of them are Muslims, Indonesians maintain very different systems of social identification. For example, when Javanese try to explain the behavior of a Sundanese or a Balinese counterpart, they might say “because it is his adat.” Differences in the ways ethnic groups practice Islam are often ascribed to adat. Each group may have different patterns of observing religious holidays, attending the mosque, expressing respect, or burying the dead. *

Adat in the sense of “custom” is often viewed as one of the deepest—even sacred—sources of consensus within an ethnic group, however, the word itself is from Arabic. Through centuries of contact with outsiders, Indonesians have a long history of contrasting themselves and their traditions with those of others, and their notions of who they are as a people have been shaped in basic ways by these encounters. On some of the more isolated islands in eastern Indonesia, for instance, one finds ethnic groups that have no word equivalent to adat because they have had very little contact with outsiders. *

Early in the New Order, the notion of adat came to take on a national significance in touristic settings such as Balinese artistic performances and museum displays. Taman Mini, a kind of ethnographic theme park on the outskirts of Jakarta, seeks to display and interpret the cultural diversity of Indonesia. This 100-hectare park is landscaped to look like the Indonesian archipelago in miniature when viewed from an overhead tramway. There is a house for each province, to represent vernacular architecture. The park sells distinctive local hand weapons, textiles, and books explaining the customs of the province. One powerful message of the park is that adat is contained in objective, material culture, which is aesthetically pleasing and indeed marketable, but which is more or less distinct from everyday social life. Furthermore, the exhibits convey the impression to some observers that ethnicity is a simple aesthetic matter of regional and spatial variations rather than an issue of deep emotional or political attachments. However, the park provides visitors with a vivid and attractive (if not always convincing) model for how the Indonesian national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity, a Javanese slogan dating to fourteenth-century Kediri poet Mpu Tantular’s poem “Sutasoma”) might be understood. *

When Indonesians talk about their society in inclusive terms, they are more likely to use a word such as budaya (culture) than adat. One speaks of kebudayaan Indonesia, the “culture of Indonesia,” as something grand, that refers to traditions of refinement and high civilization. The dances, music, and literature of Java and Bali and the great monuments associated with these islands’ religion are often described as examples of “culture” or “civilization” but not “custom” (or adat). However, as the following descriptions show, the variety of sources of local identification underscore the diversity rather than the unity of the Indonesian population. *

Javanese People and Their Dominance in Indonesia

The Javanese are Indonesia’s and Southeast Asia's largest ethnic group and the third largest Muslim ethnic group in the world following Arabs and Bengalis. They live primarily in the provinces of east and Central Java but are found throughout Indonesia’s islands. “Wong Djawa” and “Tijang Djawi” are the names that Javanese use to refer to themselves. The Indonesian term for them is “Ornag Djawa.” The word Java is derived from the Sanskrit word “yava”, meaning “barely, grain.” The name is very old and appeared in Ptolemy’s “Geography”, from Roman Empire of the A.D. 2nd century. [Source: M. Marlene Martin, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures Volume 5: East / Southeast Asia:” edited by Paul Hockings, 1993 ~]

There are over 100 million Javanese, the majority of whom live in Jawa Timur and Jawa Tengah provinces; most of the rest live in Jawa Barat Province and on Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and other islands. Altogether, some 150 million people live on Java, about half the population of Indonesia. Although many Javanese express pride at the grand achievements of the illustrious courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta and admire the traditional arts associated with them, most Javanese tend to identify not with that elite tradition, or even with a lineage or clan, but with their own village of residence or origin. These villages, or desa, are typically situated on the edge of rice fields, surrounding a mosque, or strung along a road.

The Javanese dominate many facades of Indonesian life. They control the government and the military and also control large sectors of the economy. Many of Indonesia's most lucrative export crops are grown on Java. Non-Javanese Indonesians have often complained that Dutch colonial rule was replaced by a kind of Javanese “colonialism.” From the perspective of Jakarta’s multiethnic, development-oriented elite, however, Javanese culture is seen as just one regional culture among many—albeit one with far greater influence over national life. Javanese culture itself is not monolithic. It is shaped by the same tensions that run through Indonesian society as a whole. Javanese Muslim purists, for example, often feel closer to Malays, Minangkabau, or Bugis Muslims than to fellow Javanese whose secular or syncretic outlooks align more with Balinese, Dayak, or Torajan traditions. [Source: Canadian Centre for Intercultural Learning, intercultures.gc.ca; A. J. Abalahin, “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life,” Cengage Learning, 2009]

Sundanese

Although there are many social, economic, and political similarities between the Javanese and Sundanese, differences abound. The Sundanese live principally in West Java, but their language is not intelligible to the Javanese. The more than 21 million Sundanese in 1992 had stronger ties to Islam than the Javanese, in terms of pesantren enrollment and religious affiliation. Although the Sundanese language, like Javanese, possesses elaborate speech levels, these forms of respect are infused with Islamic values, such as the traditional notion of hormat (respect — knowing and fulfilling one's proper position in society). Children are taught that the task of behaving with proper hormat is also a religious struggle — the triumph of akal (reason) over nafsu (desire). These dilemmas are spelled out in the pesantren, where children learn to memorize the Quran in Arabic. Through copious memorization and practice in correct pronunciation, children learn that reasonable behavior means verbal conformity with authority and subjective interpretation is a sign of inappropriate individualism. *

Although Sundanese religious practices share some of the HinduBuddhist beliefs of their Javanese neighbors — for example, the animistic beliefs in spirits and the emphasis on right thinking and self-control as a way of controlling those spirits — Sundanese courtly traditions differ from those of the Javanese. The Sundanese language possesses an elaborate and sophisticated literature preserved in Indic scripts and in puppet dramas. These dramas use distinctive wooden dolls (wayang golek, as contrasted with the wayang kulit of the Javanese and Balinese), but Sundanese courts have aligned themselves more closely to universalistic tenets of Islam than have the elite classes of Central Java. *

As anthropologist Jessica Glicken observed, Islam is a particularly visible and audible presence in the life of the Sundanese. She reported that "[t]he calls to the five daily prayers, broadcast over loudspeakers from each of the many mosques in the city [Bandung], punctuate each day. On Friday at noon, sarong-clad men and boys fill the streets on their way to the mosques to join the midday prayer known as the Juma'atan which provides the visible definition of the religious community (ummah) in the Sundanese community." She also emphasized the militant pride with which Islam is viewed in Sundanese areas. "As I traveled around the province in 1981, people would point with pride to areas of particular heavy military activity during the Darul Islam period."

It is not surprising that the Sunda region was an important site for the Muslim separatist Darul Islam rebellion that began in the 1948 and continued until 1962. The underlying causes of this rebellion have been a source of controversy, however. Political scientist Karl D. Jackson, trying to determine why men did or did not participate in the rebellion, argued that religious convictions were less of a factor than individual life histories. Men participated in the rebellion if they had personal allegiance to a religious or village leader who persuaded them to do so. *

Although Sundanese and Javanese possess similar family structures, economic patterns, and political systems, they feel some rivalry toward one another. As interregional migration increased in the 1980s and 1990s, the tendency to stereotype one another's adat in highly contrastive terms intensified, even as actual economic and social behavior were becoming increasingly interdependent. *

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: “Encyclopedia of World Cultures Volume 5: East/Southeast Asia:” edited by Paul Hockings, 1993; National Geographic, Live Science, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Natural History magazine, Australian Museum, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Encyclopedia.com, Times of London, Library of Congress, The Conversation, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Google AI, Wikipedia, The Guardian and various websites, books and other publications.

Last updated December 2025